Posted
by
timothyon Thursday December 10, 2009 @03:03PM
from the for-next-andomeda-strain-remake dept.

1sockchuck writes "A supercomputing center in Quebec has transformed a huge concrete silo into the CLUMEQ Colossus, a data center filled with HPC clusters. The silo, which is 65 feet high with two-foot thick concrete walls, previously housed a Van de Graaf accelerator dating to the 1960s. It was redesigned to house three floors of server cabinets, arranged so cold air can flow from the outside of the facility through the racks and return via an interior 'hot core.' The construction and operation of the unique facility (PDF) are detailed in a presentation from CLUMEQ."

Well the silo houses just a bit more than half(2700sq.ft) compared to the other location(it's apparently a multi-campus project, the other campus has 5000sq.ft) not sure if that's an academic requirement. As per your comment though, haven't met a computer that didn't fear comparison with an office tower....

They just opened a pit to be exposed to outside air in the winter which will create a frozen ballast. They are expecting to not have to turn on the coolers for a month on each side of winter. Which means all winter long, 1 month of fall and 1 month of spring, they do don't need to run their coolers.

So that you learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference, I will now rewrite the Linux kernel as an Eclipse plugin using a Cloud-enabled Web 2.0 XML service-oriented architecture frontend to an IBM mainframe running COBOL.

You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in mankind: cubicles.

To be dominated by me is not as bad for the future of mankind as to be dominated by the lolcats, who by the way, have already got

Nonsense - real poutine [wikipedia.org] is made with french fries fried in oil with at least 100,000 km on it - you WILL have the runs after eating enough of it...

Seriously, poutine made with fries done in new oil, cooked properly (fry them, take them out, drain, refry so the outside is crip and the inside is cooked), top with curd cheese and poutine sauce is awesome. The only thing better is Italian poutine - poutine with a thick and meaty spaghetti

I'm in Vancouver and the Poutine just isn't the same as in Quebec. I'm going to have to go there this summer (pour de la bonne Poutine!). Any ideas what restaurants serve the Italian poutine? I haven't seen or heard of it before. Is it a Montreal or maybe Toronto only thing (w/ the strong Italian communities?)?

Except that it should be "Wild (and somewhat short-sighted) New Design...". To be specific, from TFA:

The cooling coils and air handlers are located in the basement. Chilled air flows upward through the outside cold aisle and through the racks of servers. The waste heat exits the rear of the racks into the hot core, and is returned to the basement via the cold aisle.

Why on earth would they go against the laws of physics and push the cold air up and the warm air down? This would have been a much better des

if you think about it, it does make sense. the cold air will heat up after going through the racks, and that hot air will escape from the top. probably easier to push the hot air down once it is in the 'heat core' than it would be pushing hot air down the silo

I disagree. I think it would've been much smarter to put the cooling at the top of the silo. That way, you could push the cold air down through the outside supply column, then once the heat has moved to the inner "heat core", you could assist mother nature and push the heat up to the top, where it can be extracted. This would also make it a LOT easier to do Air Side Economization, since you could put the make-up and exhaust air assemblies at the top of the silo along with the other Air Handling and

I found that true in Quebec some years ago, but when I went back more recently I ran into a LOT of people who were happy to speak English, even though I speak French (albeit VERY poorly) and tried.

Me: "Bonjour"Waitress: "Hello. Can we speak English?"Me: "You got how bad my French was from 'Bonjour'?"Waitress: (giggles) "Yes"

I don't know who was laughing harder at that, me, the waitress, or my wife. But the point is that Quebec seems to have gone through a sea change in the last decade or so, and the residents seem much more accepting of Americans speaking English.

Depends on where in Quebec. Downtown Montreal is completely bilingual in any case so English works just fine. Anywhere else in the province, however, it's a nice gesture to greet people in French; it would be impolite to assume that they speak English although they probably do. Besides, it's not Americans (or generally English Canadians) that some people here dislike, it's Ontario.

I don't see what's different from a decade ago. People that sells something, like the tourism industry and restaurants, always have been used to receive people that speak English only. We in Quebec are like everybody else, we want money from the tourists. The fact that you said "Bonjour" is of course seen as a big plus since it will be seen as a sign of respect.However, Quebecers themselves expect to be served in French when they enter a restaurant, and they can be insulted if they don't, even if they speak

Give the slide author a break. He was probably one of those kids who were forbidden **by LAW** to be taught English in school before the 4th Grade.

That's bill 101 and the separatist PQ for you.They're always trying to dumb down the Quebec sheeple so that they can't work outside of Quebec. It's also illegal for parents to send their kids to English schools unless *Both* parents are English. Then can justify closing English school due to lack of enrollment...

There is no law that prevent a child to learn English prior to 4th grade in Quebec. English as a second language was just not part of the curriculum until 4th grade - but for a few years now kids learn French and English starting in grade 1.

And I'll just ignore the rest of your delusive rant as it doesn't even deserve a response.

The "4th grade" thing might be gone now but it was on the books at one point.

BTW: The quality of English being taught in Quebec is so bad that my sister, who is fluently bilingual, was asked to stay in English class (instead of getting an exemption) to help the other students. This was in Secondary 3 (Grade 9). They were learning how to ask for the time in English.

Back at my first ISP job, we had a server that was responsible for processing USENET which was named Colossus, as a reference to the film.

Man, those were the days. I remember when it couldn't keep up with the volume of newsfeeds because it had to swap too much to the HD, which of course was a huge bottleneck. So we spent thousands (tens of?) on a 100 MB RAM-based drive to handle the system's swap partition. Took a day's worth of processing down from 28+ hours down to 4-5.

That facility at the Vachon Pavillion, Université Laval in Québec city is were I spent most of my time while doing my degree in Engineering Physics. I'm glad that unused accelerator is now being revamped into something useful.

Now if only they can also find some money to paint the damn thing instead of letting it being barf-green mixed with rust....

Back in college the city was putting in a new, very large water tower. We started a rumor that it was actually a nuclear power plant disguised as a water tower and if you called the city, they would claim it was only a water tower.

They got enough calls it made the local paper. And when they tried to explain it was a water tower, "They said you'd say that!" Classic.

A data center in a silo would be almost as good. Looks like a death ray generator to me. Yeah, Canadian death ray. Pew! Pew! Pew! Eh?

And I though this new design was all about being able to compute CRCs faster!

On a more serious note:

- It's cool that they recycle the heat and use outside air for cooling during winter (Our winters are way cool enough for that!)

- When the university (also in Québec) where I did my bachelor build a new HPC datacenter in 2005, some students of the engineering faculty actually drafted a project to recycle the heat produced by the datacenter, but they were turned down with the excuse that their project wa

and this is the voice of my brother Guardian. How is it going, eh? And this is the voice of unity. Go. Oo wook oo oo oo oo oo ooooo! Oo wook oo oo oo oo oo oooooo! That is our intro theme. Yeah, that way when you have your radio on and you hear that Oo wook oo oo oo oo oo ooooo! Oo wook oo oo oo oo oo oooooo! Shut up you hoser they heard it already. Anyway OK when you hear that you will know it is the voice of World Control coming on the air to tell you something important. Beauty eh? You forgot to tell the

Put the towers IN THE GROUND. Even here in Colorado that is around 55-60F. The nice thing is that it is easier to protect down there. Heck, the old missile silos around US, Canada, Russia, etc. are IDEAL for this.

Put the towers IN THE GROUND. Even here in Colorado that is around 55-60F. The nice thing is that it is easier to protect down there. Heck, the old missile silos around US, Canada, Russia, etc. are IDEAL for this.

Powered by Stirling generator. Stick a cold side heat exchanger at the base and a hot side exchanger at the top, plumbed so you can switch them summer/winter. Pipe the heat via closed loop water pipes so you can keep the working gas loop short enough for decent RPM. Scavenge the heat from the DC as well to keep the overall losses down. Free power.

Because Quebec is a very sensible place to build a data center? The cheap hydroelectric power and cold weather 8 months of the year help reduce costs. It is relatively close to the US east coast and the bulk of the Canadian population.

Makes a fuck of a lot more sense than Texas in many ways, which is as hot as hell, and has expensive electricity. Not to mention its proximity to Mexico, which is always a worry.

The only impressive re-use of a concrete silo structure I have seen is a retrofit into a rock-climbing gym

I guess it's not exactly a silo, but the old reactor housing from the Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant was used to film the underwater scenes in The Abyss [wikipedia.org]. I'd say that is a pretty impressive re-use of a similar, although much, much bigger structure. The linked picture shows Deep Core high and dry, but they filled that mofo with a gazillion gallons of water, and then to make it look darker and deeper, they poured something like 2 gazillion little styrofoam pellets on the surface to block out the majority of t

Most of it doesn't go out of it's way to point out that it doesn't care what happens in my province. I gave you the benefit of doubt and assumed you must be playing up the Quebec-Ontario feud rather than just being an arbitrary a**. (As a side note, I of course have nothing against Ontario. It's a wonderful province.)